From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

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Saturday, 17 August 2013

Murdering the Wretched

Murdering the Wretched of the Earth

By Chris Hedges

Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The
mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of
impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the
mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an
ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims
from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid
and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and
evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews,
Christians and secularists, along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time
it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The
massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an
assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police
state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and
other poor regions of the globe into a cauldron of blood and suffering.

The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give
its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the
future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If
you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the
concrete

hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get
an education. You cannot get a job. You do not have the resources to marry. You
cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the
generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr,
or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame
and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a
religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from
the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this
chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched
of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot. The lines of battle are
being drawn in Egypt and across the globe. Adli Mansour, the titular president
appointed by the military dictator of Egypt, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has
imposed a military-led government, a curfew and a state of emergency. They will
not be lifted soon.

The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The
Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the
sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And
as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand, a war will be ignited that
will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, Westerners,
businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets.
Those radical Islamists who were persuaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that
electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back
underground, and many of the rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join
them. Crude bombs will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen
will puncture daily life in Egypt as they did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo
for The New York Times, although this time the attacks will be wider and more
fierce, far harder to control or ultimately crush.

What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global
war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by
diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment,
overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food
prices. Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger,
and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank
sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than
half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An
estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered
from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a
report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for
Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor
children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs
at more than 70 percent.

In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor
as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had
“the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering
which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable
complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who
were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had
“greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the
human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog,
misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”

The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant,
but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty
inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is
global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to
bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global
corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where
our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets.
Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark
the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what
they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...